Arizona Department of Education Agrees to Serve ELLs

May 18, 2016

Recently, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division (DOJ) reached a settlement with the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) to begin properly identifying and exiting students from English learner services.

The settlement is just the latest development in a story that dates back to (at least) 2010. That year, OCR and DOJ began an investigation into a complaint against ADE alleging that, starting in the 2006 school year “thousands of ELL students are being reclassified as “proficient” in English when test results indicate that they are not in fact proficient in English.” Specifically, the complaint stated that these errors were due to: 1) the state’s reliance on the Stanford English Language Proficiency (SELP) test and, later, the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment (AZELLA) test as the only criteria used to reclassify ELL students and 2) faulty scoring procedures that resulted in students being identified as proficient even when they weren’t.

The OCR and DOJ’s investigation found the allegations to be true. And in 2012, the OCR, DOJ and ADE entered into a voluntary agreement to address the issues uncovered during the investigation. In the analysis, I track the most recent developments in the story and the implications of the most recent settlement for the state's English Language Learners.